Baghdad Fixer (12 page)

“Dr Marufi, so nice to see you again. Actually, I had just wanted to confirm the interview for tomorrow, and of course, to say hello to you.”

“Yes, well, why don’t you come in for a few minutes and we’ll talk.”

“That’d be great. Oh, Dr Marufi. This is Nabil. Nabil, Dr Marufi from the INC. Nabil is working with us now,” she smiles at Dr Marufi, and I find myself wondering, doctor of what?

“A pleasure,” he says when he offers me his hand. “Will you be joining us?”

Sam’s eyes dart in my direction, and I know the answer.

“No, sorry. If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.” I shake his hand and notice that Sam has a pleased expression on her face.

~ * ~

As I near the Impala, Rizgar grins at me. He tilts his head to his right, indicating that I should join him in the front seat. Inside, he has the air conditioning on full blast, which seems like a recipe for running through an awful lot of petrol in a day.

“Aanisa Samara went into her meeting?” Rizgar asks.

I glance at him sideways.

“Yes, she said just a few minutes.”

“That means at least a half hour. It’s always longer than she says it will be,” Rizgar says, shifting his belly. Well-proportioned elsewhere, he has a hefty stomach that seems to compete for space with the steering wheel. His skin is doughy, with early signs of jowliness in his cheeks. He looks very much as I imagine the Kurds up north to look: meatier than us, rounder, and largely fairer. But he does not behave in the manner we have been told to expect from them. Mainly, he is not aggressive, and he does not seem wily or manipulative.

“So you’ll work with Aanisa Samara from now on?”

“I think I’ll try it out.”

“Oh, I think she is trying
you
out.” He laughs, and the rolling depth of it catches me in the stomach and makes me laugh, too.

“Calling her aanisa all the time, isn’t that a little bit old-fashioned?”

He shrugs. “I’m a lot older than you. I’m forty-five. I could be your father.”

“I don’t think so,” I offer. But it’s true. If he’d had me at seventeen, which isn’t so unheard of in the countryside, I could be his son. “How long have you worked with her?”

Rizgar shrugs. “About four weeks. Since she came to Suleimaniye, before the war. It seems longer. We don’t take many days off, even Fridays.”

I wonder if Rizgar is religious. Then again, it might just mean that he wants to have a day of rest.

“What was the other translator like?”

“Luqman? Oh, he was a nice young fellow, like you. I liked him very much.”

“Not anymore?”

“No, no, I don’t mean that.” Rizgar reaches into the box next to the gearstick, a compartment that separates driver from passenger, and retrieves a pack of cigarettes. I am surprised that he is smoking an American Brand, Lucky Strike, for surely this is much more expensive than our Iraqi brands. He flips open the box and holds it out to me, but I wave my hand and say no thank you.

“Good boy.” He taps the filter-end of a cigarette on the dashboard. “Your father is a doctor, so you must know better.” The lighter, which I hadn’t noticed him push in, pops out. He puts the cigarette in his mouth and mashes the end of it against the glowing circles, much like the target on the cigarette box.

“Luqman was a decent guy, bright. But he was not brave enough for covering war. He was always afraid we were going to get hurt, or that he would get hurt and there would be no one to take care of his family. And his Arabic wasn’t very good because he was young and had only studied in Suleimaniye. You know, after ‘91, they stopped teaching Arabic in a lot of the schools in the north. Only Kurdish. And a little bit of English or German.”

“Samara told me he had a hard time in Tikrit.”

“Well, yes, they shot at him while he was getting into the car when we were trying to leave, and it scared him so much that he decided to quit the job.”

“Was he hit?”

“No. But it was very close.” Rizgar makes a gesture with his finger, indicating a bullet whizzing over one’s head. “He was fine. He just got scared. But he was scared of other things, too.”

Rizgar takes deep pulls from the cigarette. Opens the window just enough to blow the smoke out into the hot afternoon, then closes it again. He takes another drag and says in a smoke-choked voice, “He was falling for her.”

“For Sam?”

“Of course. He told me he was in love with her and that he would try to make Samara his second wife, though he’d only been married for five years. Hah! The guy knew he was going to either wind up dead or with a broken heart. So he quit.”

An explosion somewhere makes the car shudder. Rizgar sneers and flicks the burning end of his butt in a tumbling arc out of the window. He presses on the accelerator.
“Walla,
I was wrong.
Al-Amira
is back, much more quickly than I thought,” he says. I realize that he means Sam and wonder whether he intends this as a compliment, calling her the princess, or if there is a part of him which has started to resent her.

She is still writing in her notebook as she walks over to the car. Rizgar flicks the remains of his cigarette out of the window. “You’re not married, are you?”

“
Inshallah
,” I reply. In my mind, I picture my father’s irritated gaze.

They threw something at him, Sam had said. Not shot.
A good journalist never changes
—

She opens the door and her scent enters before she does: I think it makes her smell sweeter than she otherwise would. My mind’s overactive easel paints a picture of a handsome young man. He has my eyes but a shock of wavy red hair. He’s wearing an American military uniform and is sitting in a tank near the Tigris, turning people away from the bridge. That’s what my son would look like if I married her. A red-haired soldier. An occupier. No, I cannot imagine ever loving Samara Katchens.

~ * ~

10

Loving

I follow Sam into the pool courtyard between the buildings. A cluster of foreigners turns when she strides past the white tables and one woman waves, while another man with yellowish-blond hair and no shirt calls out Sam’s name. I see Joon Park is with them and I nod and smile at her but she doesn’t respond — perhaps her eyesight is not very good.

“Hello,” Sam chants back to them. “You guys still going to catch dinner at the Flowerland?”

“After seven,” the shirtless man says. His T-shirt is tucked into his trouser pocket like a rag, “just after my Q&A.” His chest is firm and muscular in a way I would expect a professional athlete’s to be, and it has no hair on it. He seems half-man and half-boy.

“Well,” Sam pulls the door of the first tower open again and gestures for me to walk ahead, “I may be a little late.” And I think I catch a gesture, a nod in my direction. Late, because of me?

“Samara, my love, we wouldn’t dream of dining without you,” the blond man says sounding affectionate but artificial. “We’ll wait for you.”

“It’ll give you time to work on that tan,” she says, and lifts her sunglasses with a quick flash that borders on flirty.

She lets the door fall shut behind her and walks to the entrance on our right. We enter the hotel café, all done in orange and white, the futuristic-looking white chairs reminiscent of the 1970s. The café is empty except for three men sitting behind the counter. The oldest among them, maybe in his early fifties, rises to his feet.

“Maftouh?”
she asks. Open?

“Aiy, tfaddali.”
Yes, please, says the man. He points to the unoccupied tables near the window overlooking the pool, which seems surprisingly clear and blue compared to how it looked earlier.

Sam faces me. “Why don’t we sit here and have a coffee before we call it a day?”

I wait for her to choose a table, and find myself relieved when she chooses the one furthest from the men behind the counter, who are looking me over with some interest.

“Two coffees,” she says, holding up a V-sign with her fingers. “Do you want something to eat?”

In truth, I am getting hungry, but I just shrug as if to say anything will do, and Sam takes this for a no.

“We had a really good start today,” she says. “But we also had some problems we’re going to have to work on.” She leans her right elbow and her hand rests for a moment in the hollows of her cheeks. “You know, sometimes I forget that the translation thing isn’t always so intuitive.”

I move to respond, but then stop myself.

“I mean, your English is wonderful so I assumed it wouldn’t be a problem, but I don’t think fluency is the issue here. You just need to learn to get into the right rhythm for, you know, for the interview process to work.”

Sam flicks up her wrist and peeks at her watch with a hint of a frown. “I should call the desk. Anyway,” she smiles at me with her chin slightly lifting, mouth closed. “They can wait. So, what I was saying is, I think that you just need to get into the right rhythm of translating. I ask the question, you translate it, and when the person starts talking, you stop him every two or three sentences to translate. And I mean, two sentences
max.
If he gets to three, you just gotta cut ‘em off. And don’t forget to use the first-person.”

I can feel my palms start to grow damp, as if tiny springs in them have just now decided to release their dammed up waters, and the same sweatiness is growing between my legs. If she tells me once more to use the first-person, I just might tell her she can find herself another interpreter.

“I want to understand correctly,” I begin. “Is the problem that you would prefer to have me write down whatever it is the person says and then translate it to you?”

“No,” Sam says, looking perplexed. “I didn’t say anything about writing.”

“But you’ve been saying that you want me to translate, and as far as I understand the word, to translate is to work in written form. To translate is to take a written document and then to change the material into a written document in another language.”

Sam’s eyes grow narrow.

“If one moves from a spoken language to another spoken language, that is interpretation,” I say. “The other is translation, is it not?”

“What are you—? Oh, you mean interpretation as distinct from translation?” Her eyes ride upwards, as if reviewing a registry of terms embedded in her frontal lobe. “That’s probably a British thing. We don’t really make that distinction in America. Or you might be spending too much time memorizing the dictionary.” She laughs in a way that sounds like a sneeze that has stopped midway. “Just kidding,” she says. She tilts her head to one side and smiles slightly, as if to apologize.

“Do you not distinguish between translating and interpreting, then?”

“Hmm. No, actually. I mean, I might say you were my translator or my fixer, but I wouldn’t say interpreter. That sounds a little too, I don’t know, formal, like one of those funny little guys sitting in a glass box at a UN meeting, you know what I mean?”

The waiter appears at the edge of our table with our coffees, and a plateful of green and black olives.

“Thanks,” Sam says, without actually looking up at the waiter. She throws a bunch of her hair, which had been hanging just above the table, behind her shoulder and plucks a large black olive off the dish. She puts it in her mouth and begins to work it, and suddenly I feel aware of her tongue and her teeth, sucking salty bits of flesh from the perimeter of the pit.

“Why fixer?”

She lifts her long fingers to collect a pit, and then she puts another olive in her mouth and begins again. “You know, a person who fixes things — appointments, travel, whatever. A fixer’s the guy who makes it all happen when a visiting reporter comes to town. Anyway, I’m not interested in the semantics of the whole thing,” she says. She smacks her lips together, the sound of a kiss, and pushes the olives towards me. “Have some.”

These olives look like they’ve come from a can, but I take one anyway. “That’s no problem at all,” I say. “In future, I will interpret it just as you require.”

“You know, I don’t even like the word interpret. Interpret suggests that you’re going to filter what you’re hearing through your own opinions, and that you might pepper in your own analysis and understanding of the situation. You know, like trying to give a forecast, like interpreting the future or something.”

“Right.”

“Right,” she smiles quickly. “That’s exactly what I don’t want. I mean, I’m really curious to hear your opinions, but not in the middle of the interview. For example, telling me you’re not sure whether Saddam really killed as many Shi’ites as people say he did, that’s also the kind of thing that, well,” she sits straighter and pats down the air with her right hand, “...better to leave that out.” She picks up her coffee cup and takes a short sip. “Okay?”

“Okay. But you might want to know that, right? I mean, you would want to know if someone’s lying to you, would you not?”

“Well, sure, but I don’t need my fixer telling me that in the middle of an interview. I mean, you can’t read someone’s mind. No one can. Half the things that Hatem character said might have been lies. But what can you do? You can’t run a polygraph test on him while he’s speaking.” She pauses. “Think of it like being a two-way radio,” she says, sitting up, excited by her analogy. “You know how important a radio is in a time of war? Crucial. Just crucial. But the radio never interjects. It’s the means of communication. And that’s what you need to be, I mean, once the interview is underway. Sort of like a human radio.”